When the math doesn’t add up

Five hundred million dollars. That is how much a Legislative Finance Committee report says New Mexico has spent on housing initiatives, aimed at combatting homelessness, within a span of three years, most specifically in New Mexico’s three most populous areas: Albuquerque, Sante Fe and Las Cruces.

In an article several months ago, I spoke about tiny home costs. Recall, the cost attributed to them was $100,000, which would typically include the land and infrastructure, not just the home itself. This also makes for convenient math – 5,000 tiny homes could have been funded using this money. This math is even easier to comprehend when we consider a point-in-time count of homelessness in New Mexico of around 5,000 people at any given time.

New Mexico could have housed every single homeless person with the money. A modern tiny home, with washer and dryer, privacy, air conditioning and stability. But what, instead, did New Mexico get for its investment? A sharp increase in the homeless crisis.

So perhaps homelessness isn’t just about lacking a home. If so, throwing money at the problem would have long ago solved it. Perhaps instead, we should have been funding mental health and substance use disorder treatment programs. Perhaps we should take the extra step to mandate treatment to save people from harming themselves.

I believe that compassion and accountability are two sides of the same coin. You don’t abandon one for the other. A truly compassionate response is not housing first, but treatment, job training, and self-respect so that the house is appreciated and the person is on the path to being whole mentally and physically, not just financially. I would prefer to invest in people, not housing. Don’t just build houses, build the person back into a functioning member of society.

But that requires responsibility. Sometimes, it requires rock bottom, the kind of rock bottom that scares a person into seeking something better. Looking death in the eye and choosing not to dance with him further.

But New Mexico doesn’t allow anyone to reach true rock bottom. The cushion is always there, under the guise of compassion, insulating those suffering from mental health disorders and drug abuse so that they hover safely above rock bottom, in a purgatory of self-harm, addiction and abuse.

After all, if those 5,000 people were housed, and the housing-first model actually worked, the problem would be solved. The money coming to communities and the state to help the homeless would cease.

No, instead, we build apartments for $350,000 per unit and expect a chronically homeless drug addict to be comfortable enough to choose sobriety based solely on having four walls suddenly bequeathed to them. That isn’t realistic and it isn’t the best use of taxpayer funding.

Compassion requires tough love to mandate action and accountability on the part of the individual but also on the part of the “system”. It is easy to build a physical structure. There are specific building codes and design standards that give developers a blueprint, literally, for housing. It is much harder to develop a treatment program and craft legislation to require folks to meet specific accountability standards that might actually heal them.

New Mexico needs to abandon the easy path citing misguided compassion, and adopt a program that seeks to solve the problem through accountability. Ironically, that is truly the compassionate response.

Shawna Pfeiffer is a life-long Dona Ana County Resident, graduate of NMSU, small business owner, hobby farmer, dog-lover, outdoor enthusiast and mother to two young children. She can be reached at srpfeiffer1@gmail.com.